


Printed In Red

by as_time_stands_still



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Deadlock Gang, Gen, Latino Jesse McCree, ODD Ashe, Pre-Overwatch, could be read as platonic McAshe, lots of banter
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-03
Updated: 2019-03-03
Packaged: 2019-11-08 15:11:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17983478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/as_time_stands_still/pseuds/as_time_stands_still
Summary: Jesse McCree has been nothing but a thorn in Ashe’s side ever since she pulled him off of that farm in Las Cruces. However, when the other leaders of the still-young Deadlock gang try to nudge Ashe out of power, she has to make the ultimate score to secure her position as a gang leader. But a plan this grand is going to require more than her own brains and BOB’s brawn—unfortunately, Ashe needs McCree.Or: Jesse and Ashe strike just the right chord to simultaneously calm and infuriate each other. They have the other's back anyway.





	Printed In Red

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is inspired by the song Oh My My by Ruelle and Unstoppable by Hidden Citizens. I'd recommend giving the songs a listen!.

The red Arizona dirt scraped beneath her fingers as Ashe slid backward, propelled by the recoil from her coach gun. She snarled at the man across from her, his gun aimed directly at her head. Two successive shots rang out and Ashe rolled out of the way, two splotches of paint against the rocks where her head had been moments before.

She used her momentum to keep moving, somersaulting to her knees and snapping her gun into position. The sights were larger than she was used to, but she still took aim with an audible exhalation of breath and fired.

McCree yelped, dodging the paintball by a hair’s breadth. He returned fire and Ashe cried out as one of the paintballs clipped her arm. She hissed through gritted teeth, looking back up to return fire. McCree was nowhere to be seen. 

Then she heard the click of the paintball gun being cocked. She rolled her eyes and turned her head. Sure enough, the insufferable parody of a cowboy was standing behind her with a gun to her head, execution-style.

I hate you! She screamed in her mind, though she wasn’t sure if it was directed at McCree for winning or herself for being sloppy enough to lose track of him. He was six feet tall for Christ’s sake!

“Looks like money can’t buy everything,” he drawled.

“I will skin you alive.” Ashe retorted. 

“Look, Elizabeth, I really don’t want to have to shoot you, even with a paintball. Call the match, please?”

She scowled at Jesse. “Don’t call me Elizabeth if you want to keep your eyes.” Ashe raised her hands in surrender, tossing her gun to the side. “All right, you won fair and square.”

The few Deadlock members who were rooting for Jesse cheered from the top of the abandoned gas station they had claimed as their paintball arena. Idiots. 

To his credit, he wasn’t being smug the way Randall, or well, anyone else would have been. To be fair, that wouldn’t happen. McCree was the only one who had ever managed to beat her and no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t win. God, her blood boiled every time she thought about it.

Jesse held out a hand to help her up, but Ashe knocked it to the side, hefting her gun and standing up on her own as she dusted off her paint-splattered pants.

“Come on Ashe, don’t be that way,” Jesse said.

“I’ll be however I want,” she spat. 

He shrugged, backing away. “Do you want me to put your gun up?”

“I’ll do it myself thanks.”

“Oh the rich girl doing some work for herself for once,” McCree said, with just too much of a bite in his tone to really be teasing.

Ashe growled deep in her throat and fired four shots directly into McCree’s chest. He stumbled backward, barely catching himself before he hit the ground.

“The hell, Ashe?”

“Insult me again,” she said, “I _dare_ you.”

“Jesus, Ashe, it’s just a game.”

It’s just a game, Ashe. Why are you taking it so seriously? You always ruin everything. She dismissed the silent voices of her peers and swung her gun over her shoulder so that the barrel rested on the nape of her neck. “Well, McCree, you never did seem to understand that provoked animals bite.”

He clenched his jaw, the veins in his neck tightening. Part of her wanted Jesse to lose it. Just to give her something to fault him on. When she met his gaze, he sighed. “Lesson learned, Miss Calamity.”

Everyone watching on top of the gas station was deathly quiet, staring at them. Ashe’s lip curled and she gave McCree one last sideways glance. “Fair and square cowboy.”

He tipped his hat to her before holding out his hand. “I’ll take your gun now, thanks.”

“I said I’ll take care of it,” she hissed.

“And I said I learned my lesson. I don’t want to take my chances of getting shot again.” He laughed. “You got me good though, I’ll give you that.”

Reluctantly, Ashe surrendered her paintball gun. Their audience was still frozen and she raised her voice to them. “Hey! Show’s over, get out of here.” No one moved. Ashe rolled her eyes. “I said scram!”

A flurry of movement broke out in the small crowd as they all tried to get off the rooftop as fast as possible. They seemed to want to put as much distance between themselves and Ashe as possible. Probably a smart move for their health.

All save for one. Tuille, Ashe’s personal assistant and the closest thing to a real friend she had sauntered up to her, Bob in tow. The hulking omnic tilted his head, blinking a few times. The tension melted from Ashe’s shoulders. “Sorry to let you down, big guy.”

“I’m sure that McCree deserved it,” Tuille said, her thick Mexican accent in stark contrast to Ashe’s Texas drawl, “But shooting Jesse after the match was over was a dick move, Ashe.”

Ashe looked away. “Yeah well, I got angry.”

“Which doesn’t warrant that kind of reaction.”

“Hey now,” Ashe snapped, “I’ll decide what kind of reaction is appropriate. It’s not your job to psychoanalyze me.”

“You definitely don’t pay me enough to do that,” Tuille said. The small smile on her face was enough to soothe the fire burning in Ashe’s temples. 

Tuille reached into the large messenger bag she always wore, pulling out a tablet and a large flask of what Ashe guessed to be whiskey. Her assistant handed the flask to her and Ashe drank deeply, letting it well in her mouth so that the soft burn hit the back of her throat all at once. She wiped her mouth as she handed the flask back to Tuille.

“I figured I’d bring whiskey since if you won, we could celebrate. I knew it was more likely you’d want a condolence prize.”

“Well now,” Ashe said with a smirk, “What would the good Lord think of an adult offering a minor alcohol?”

“Go ask your local priest and get back to me,” Tuille said, without looking up from her tablet. “Do you have any plans for the rest of the day? We haven’t hit a score in a while so no need to crunch numbers.”

“Yeah,” Ashe said, “I’m going to the shooting gallery.”

Tuille sighed. “Practice won’t make you better than McCree. I’ve seen the kid at work, he’s practically superhuman.”

“Superhuman my ass,” Ashe said. She gestured to Bob and the omnic lowered his arm so that he could lift her up on his shoulder. Jesse’s insult flashed through her mind. When had she gotten so soft? 

She waved Bob off, much to the omnic’s confusion. “Nevermind, I’ll walk myself.”

Tuille raised an eyebrow but said nothing as Ashe stalked off towards the shooting gallery. 

-

_Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!_

The heavy shriek of bullets shredding into wood echoed through the shooting gallery. When Ashe had unloaded her dozenth round of a dozen bullets into the targets painted on the wall, she finally tossed her gun and earmuffs to Bob, who caught it easily, offering her a glass of lemonade on a tray in the other. Tuille, who was reading a business book in a lounge chair, had already drained her glass.

Ashe took a sip of her lemonade, then paused.

It wasn’t the idea of being richer than the other Deadlock members that bothered her. Hell, if she taught them how to run a few credit card scams they’d all be living it high. But Ashe wasn’t nouveau-riche like the rest of Deadlock. It was those mannerisms one could only learn from being raised on an estate that made her the constant butt of jokes. Years of sideways comments pulsed in the back of her mind with every choice that she made. She always betrayed herself.

“Tuille?”

Tuille hummed in response, lifting one side of her earmuffs to hear Ashe better.

“Do you think I’m obnoxious?”

“No more than any other teenager.”

“No, no, no,” Ashe said, digging the fingernails of her free hand into her palms. “Do you think...well what I’m trying to ask is if you think I’m more...high maintenance than the other Deadlock leaders.”

If there was one thing Tuille Trujillo was, it was perceptive. Her uncanny ability to know exactly what Ashe was thinking had been a great source of grief to her on many an occasion, but in this case, Ashe was grateful the woman could understand even with her poor choice of words.

“If what you’re asking is if I think you’re a rich kid, then yes _princesita_ ,” Tuille said.

Ashe swallowed hard, nodding. “Ah. Okay then.” What was she expecting? She was ten times as fussy than anyone else in Deadlock. She had an omnic butler serving her lemonade on a shooting range for Christ’s sake. Any other answer would be a lie.

“Ay let me finish,” Tuille said. “Are you prissy? Yes. Do I think it has any bearing on your ability to lead Deadlock? No. If anything, it makes you more competent. Randall and Kelly could never hope to handle numbers the way you do. They could never shoot like you, either.” She inclined her head towards the targets. The centers of the targets were littered with Ashe’s bullets. 

It wasn’t good enough. Second-best was never good enough. One of the cardinal lessons Ashe had learned in her desperate bid for her parents’ attention: work meant nothing if you didn’t come out on top.

Ashe shoved her lemonade back towards Bob, spilling it in the process. She snatched her gun and shoved another cartridge into the viper’s chamber before bringing it up to her face to shoot. _Bang-thwack!_

“Elizabeth,” Tuille said sharply, “What did Jesse say to you that made you so angry?”

“Nothing.” Ashe pictured Jesse standing in front of the target and fired without hesitation. 

“Sure sounds like nothing.”

Ashe unloaded three more bullets before responding. “No, it really was nothing. He implied that I was too stuck-up to put my gun away and it rubbed me wrong. It shouldn’t have. That’s all people say about me.”

“You shouldn’t care what people say.”

Ashe snarled. “Yeah, well, I do!” She emptied the cartridge and reached for another. Tuille grabbed her wrist. Ashe snatched her hand away.

“From what I hear, you used to be friends with Jesse,” Tuille said, her tone measured.

“Yeah, we were just _chummy_.”

“What happened?”

A phantom bullet wound blossomed in Ashe’s hip. The rain soaked into her hair and clothes as Jesse practically dragged her into a side building, bleeding from a gunshot wound of his own. Ashe had often reflected on how if that situation had been a little different they probably would have kissed.

Instead, she had ripped him apart.

“I don’t know,” Ashe said, her voice low. “We just drifted apart, I guess.”

Tuille clearly wasn’t satisfied, but she didn’t get the chance to push it.

“Speak of the devil and he shall appear,” Ashe grumbled as Jesse McCree made his way into the shooting range. 

“Hello to you to Ashe. Ms. Trujillo, Bob.” He tipped his hat. “Ashe, Randall wants you at HQ.”

“Of course he does,” Ashe said. She instructed Bob to put away the box of cartridges she had pulled out for her shooting spree and turned to Tuille. “Take the rest of the day off. Go get some chocolate cake or whatever it is you like.”

“Chocolate pie.”

“There’s no difference,” Ashe said.

“Of all the people I thought I’d hear say that, I never expected you’d be one of them, Ashe,” Jesse called.

“This doesn’t involve you,” she retorted.

There was a smile on her face. It didn’t escape Tuille’s notice. She gave Ashe a knowing look before quietly slipping out, slinging her messenger bag with her. Ashe made to follow.

“Hey, Ashe, can I talk to you?”

Damn it. Of course, he wanted to talk.

She put on the most laid-back expression she could muster and turned around. “Sorry about shooting you in the chest. Hope I didn’t hurt you too badly.”

“I deserved it,” Jesse said. 

Ashe shook her head. “Why are you so damn magnanimous all the time. You know you don’t gotta be the perfect gentleman out here.”

“I’m definitely not that.” Jesse laughed. “Look, Ashe, I didn’t mean what I said.”

“Oh, you did. Apology accepted, but don’t pretend like it was an unwarranted insult.”

Ashe could barely hear herself screaming his name over the thunderstorm that raged outside of their little hideaway. Everything hurt _so badly_. The blood spilling out from her side. The pain in Jesse’s voice when she raked her fingernails down the side of his face.

When Jesse didn’t respond, Ashe just nodded a goodbye, turning to leave. 

“I’m sorry Ashe,” Jesse muttered.

“Yeah me too,” she whispered. But she didn’t think Jesse could hear her.

**Author's Note:**

> There's hardly any work starring my Deadlock favs. While I'd much prefer to read than write, I'll give back to the people haha. I feel like a lot of people hate on Ashe for being "a bratty rich kid" but quite honestly it sounds like she has untreated Oppositional Defiant Disorder so I'm writing her as such (as someone who has a family member with ODD I know firsthand what it's like to be around them). Feedback on that particular tidbit would be appreciated. Thanks for reading!


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